Glossary
What is a role account email address?
A role account is an email address that reaches a function rather than a named individual — info@, sales@, support@. It is typically a shared inbox or a distribution list, so several people may read it and no one person owns it.
Also known as Role-based email address · Generic address · Shared inbox
The local parts people mean
info · sales · support · admin · contact · hello · help · billing · accounts · careers · jobs · hr · legal · press · marketing · noreply · no-reply · postmaster · abuse · webmaster · security · privacy · dpo.
Two of those are not conventions but requirements. RFC 2142 specifies postmaster for any domain that receives mail and abuse for any organisation offering internet services — which means a domain with working mail and no postmaster@ is out of compliance with the standard, not merely unhelpful. It is a small, checkable fact that none of the pages currently ranking for this term includes.
Why senders and ESPs treat them differently
A shared inbox has no single consenting recipient. Whoever is on rota this week did not sign up for your list, and the person who did may have left. That is a real consent problem rather than a technical one, and it is why some email service providers suppress role addresses outright under their own terms.
Do not over-read that into "never send to them". Plenty of legitimate B2B correspondence is correctly addressed to sales@ or press@ — that is what the address is for. The distinction that matters is between mail the mailbox exists to receive and mail it does not.
How VerifyInbox handles it
If a role mailbox accepts mail, VerifyInbox reports it as deliverable with roleAccount: true and mailboxType: "role". Classification flags describe the address; they never change the verdict. A shared inbox that answers is a real mailbox, and reporting it as invalid would be reporting something untrue. In contact discovery the same address is classified generic rather than personal, so a domain search can be filtered either way.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
emailStatus | deliverable |
reason | mailbox_exists |
roleAccount | true |
mailboxType | role |
Discovery type | generic — as opposed to personal |
Two questions, and a verifier only answers one
This table is the whole argument of the page. undeliverable means the mailbox does not exist, and the answer to both questions is no. deliverable with roleAccount: true means the mailbox does exist — and whether to send to it is a judgement about your campaign, not a fact about the mail system.
Collapsing the two is how lists quietly lose working contacts. A verifier can tell you whether mail will arrive. Only you can tell whether it should.
When a role address is the right target
Press enquiries to press@. A security disclosure to security@. A data-protection request to privacy@ or dpo@. A support question to support@. These are addresses published so that exactly this mail reaches someone, and using them is what they are for.
The counter-example worth naming: a cold sales pitch to abuse@ is not clever targeting. It is mail to the mailbox whose entire purpose is reporting people who send mail like that.
See the addresses published on a company website, with the page each came from. No account, and it runs now: Domain search
Related terms
Sources
Primary sources checked 11 September 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.